Seeds for Thought

I swivel my office chair around to glimpse at my blue heeler sprawled in front of the bookcase behind me.  She raises her head briefly in anticipation, decides, "He ain't going anywhere," and flops back down on her side.  Yeah. Sun's out. " If Hell is hot, what do we have outside right now?" I wonder.  Early morning color has receded from that lovely golden hue that makes you want to photograph the dumbest things because everything looks wonderful, warm and glows in the early morning light.  Truth be told, even psycho cat came in from the cold after a brief tour de grounds this morning. He's upstairs stretched out on the bed.  Remember, he was raised outdoors, slept under a porch for the first nine months of his life until I rescued him trying to eat a frozen pan of leftovers in the dark of a 10 below zero February night.

See that leafy stuff behind Mandy Mae?  Them's carrots.  I'm eating Wal-Mart canned carrots right now because I screwed up on the garden plan.  The carrots I did grow either went into my vegan friend Jorge's mouth or into home canned, pickled,dilled carrots n' veggies. Then there was the year I grew sweet, really sweet carrots so delicious I gave most of them away in a fit of , "You won't believe how good these carrots taste!"  WTF is wrong with me? Yes, there's always next season.

California Dreaming

Shut-in by two days of frightful below zero temperatures, I only let the dog out long enough to poop and pee. She does a few practice runs along the east fence line and comes back to the house limping from the cold. Today I'll put on three layers and the warmest parka I have to fill the wood bin once the thermometer reaches 10 degrees. That and lunch are long range goals. 

For every negative there is a positive. Something I hold to be a basic fact of life.

Quincley Tharpes, a therapist who helped me over my mental speed bumps of dreams of being in combat in a previous life as a inner city educator when the "free" counseling provided by an educational system now so defunct and bankrupt that it is unable to staff basic needs for students  tells me my blue eyes match my shirt.  I smile at the compliment but do not respond.  Then she says, "You got one rubber band life style,"  cutting me to the quick.  Whatchamean rubber band?

You live in the city, move to a farm, move back to the inner city, move lock stock and barrel into a tent for a year in the sticks across from a commune, then you move back to the city, bounce around the city and teaching jobs (52 different schools)- big fat red rubber band boy.

She pops another hard candy into her chubby little mouth and smiles. She has a Smurf statute on her desk.

Every trip I take, every plane ride across the country each and every foray outside the womb is a comparison, for the file folder that goes into a mental cabinet labeled " potential places to live". Some trips last for years.  One learns that 103 degrees in the shade on your birthday in May, when the soil is so hot it burns your wrists pulling what tortuous few weeds grow in the red iron oxide sandstone in the lower yard isn't much different than trying to pull a frozen spade out of the compost pile in January.  You worry for the red worms buried under all the shredded leaves.

Nine inches of rain in a three day period makes even the most sane person wonder about apocalyptic prophesies. Standing in water up to your ankles, I wash mud off  potatoes leaves and hope the crop isn't destroyed.  At the library yesterday I point out to the assistant director that in today's weather I don't go out with a net tucked under my straw hat so biting fleas don't fly up my nose and into my eyes.  Look at the bright side.

I think I'll go read seed catalogs.